Sleep apnea 'avoidance'

I am sure plenty of you have heard about sleep apnea. If you haven't and are overweight PLEASE educate yourself. I called this thread sleep apnea avoidance because it seems A LOT of overweight women and overweight men simply avoid it all together. They snore, they are overweight, they are tired, yet they avoid getting sleep apnea checked out. It is estimated 93% (93%!!!!!!!!!) of women who have sleep apnea are not diagnosed (82% for men). It is more common in men, but far from gender specific.

What does it have to do with weight loss? Quite possibly everything. Sleep apnea in a nutshell is someone who has 'apneas' or cessation of breathing repeatedly through the night. Your body then has to choose to let you die or wake you up. Obviously it wakes you up. But this leads to so many health and weight issues you would not believe. You are never getting deep or restorative sleep, hence many people are tried. Believe it or not the apneas can happen into the more than a hundred times an hour range. When I got tested I was averaging 28 pre-treatment.

So you are not really sleeping. This messes with your metabolism. Your body produces more of something that slows the metabolism and makes you hungry and less of something that speeds up your metabolism. I am calling them something because I do not have their name but you can look it up. You are also most likely tired to some degree. Hence you will exercise less. It also leads to high blood pressure, diabetes, a host of things.

The good news is that it can be treated, not necessarily cured but treated by wearing a mask during night when you sleep. I would take that over treating diabetes or popping who knows how many blood pressure pills or having a heart attack any single second of any day of my life. I got use to the mask after a couple of days and now I don't even notice it.

BTW I am a guy and my wife is over-joyed about it. You wear it when you are sleeping not all the time you are in bed. I don't snore anymore, I have more energy all day long (and all night). She is VERY happy I started it.

So why am I posting? When something so important to weight loss, so important to health, and something that has so many positive benefits and is pretty, overall, simple to use you want to share. And SO MANY people ignore it. What is especially sad is people are pretty sure they have it, but don't even want to do a sleep study.

If you are one of those sadly you are putting your health in a lot of jepodary and making your weight loss journey A LOT harder (possibly impossible) as well. I have been on the CPAP (the name for the treatment) about 2 months now. I have lost a few pounds, but have already lost a couple of inches from my stomach, an entire inch from my neck, and have a ton more energy. My weight is probably coming off a lot more than the scale shows since it is so much easier to exercise I am gaining a bunch of muscle.

In any event check it out. So few people do. Your choice. Be one of the 93 out of 100 who are putting their health at very serious risk or the one of the 7 who are getting control of their health and their weight loss journey. Not to mention getting control over their sleep and thus control over every waking minute. Sleep is unbelivabely important for quality of everything. Once you get treated for sleep apnea you will understand this. Without good sleep..you suffer, plain and simple.

I will throw in my two cents worth here. My husband told me I snored and needed to go for a sleep study for years. I finally went in February after reading about the apnea/weight loss issues. I have struggled for years and years to lose weight to no avail.

My apnea was SO bad...I stopped breathing at least 10 seconds over 128 times an hour! (if you do the math, that is at LEAST 20 seconds out of every 60 I was not breathing!) The high, during REM sleep was 165. No wonder I was tired and could not lose weight, why my blood sugar was climbing even on a strict diet and maximum meds, and my blood pressure seemed uncontrollable! Since being on cpap for three months, I have lost almost 20 pounds, my blood pressure looks good and my blood sugars are coming down.

I was not happy about using a cpap at first. No one really is. But not feeling like I am suffocating at night, and sleeping without waking up every couple hours is heaven. If you have to get up to go to the bathroom more than once or twice a WEEK, the doctor told me it is TOO much! I was getting up three or four times a night. I am very used to the cpap and the mask now. I actually LIKE it. How can one NOT like something that is more than likely saving their life?

Do you snore? Are you overweight? Is losing weight hard and you don't know why? Do you take BP meds? Please ask your doctor to send you for a sleep study! I wish I had done it ten years ago when my husband first started urging me to go....

Nocturnia happened to be one of my symptoms. I went to the bathroom 3 to 5 times per night before treatment. In the past 2 months, zero times. It eliminated it from the first night on.

Sorry if I was sounding like I was on a pulpit. I would suspect Ellen knows the feeling. You just want to help other people because it is, after you get use to it, so easy to do, and has such profound benefits. And not getting treated can be really bad.

Just hope anyone who even suspects they might have it, looks into a sleep study and has one. Thousands, tens of thousands of people end up saying it was the best thing they ever did for themselves.

My family told me that I snored and it sounded like a train coming in. Scary!

My husband told me that I would sit up while I slept in bed. I had no idea.

When I took the sleep study, I found out that I was having over 10 apneas in a 10 minute period. That's what they told me.

When they came in to wake me up and tell me this, I thought I had "slept" all night and it was about 6am. I had only been "asleep" for one hour~it was 11pm.

I hated the cpap at first, but I love it now. Not sure what direct impact it has had on my weight loss, but I wouldn't sleep without it now. Too scary to think what might have happened if I hadn't had the sleep study!

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